The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

Open call for industry participation and contributions; Project initiated by Mozilla

24th March, 2009 – GDC, San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an ‘Accelerated 3D on Web’ working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months. Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, stand for chair, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release. The working group will consider various approaches including exposing OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 capabilities within ECMAScript. The Khronos Accelerated 3D on Web working group will commence work during April 2009. More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or emailing info@khronos.org.

With increasing performance, JavaScript is positioned to be a viable programming language for classes of applications currently written in C and C++. Graphics developers targeting large audiences through web applications would be well-served by bringing additional graphics capabilities the web platform, particularly the ability to work with 3D. OpenGL is available on every desktop operating system and a significant and growing percentage of embedded platforms have adopted OpenGL ES as their native graphics API. As OpenGL is familiar to application developers, the fusion of OpenGL and OpenGL ES capabilities with the web platform holds great promise. Mozilla has proposed exposing the OpenGL ES 2.0 API and capabilities to an ECMAScript container such as a web browser to enable the development of cross-platform 3D-capable web applications. The working group will consider this and other proposals and any contributions from other working group members.

“With more and more content moving to the web and JavaScript getting faster every day, the time is right to create an open, general purpose API for accelerated 3D graphics on the web. Google looks forward to offering its expertise in graphics and web development to this discussion,” said Matt Papakipos, engineering director at Google Inc.

“The industry has been searching for a way to bring dynamic 3D content to everyone’s web browser for many years,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. “The convergence of increasing JavaScript performance and pervasive access to accelerated OpenGL and OpenGL ES presents a potentially historic opportunity to make open, general purpose 3D capabilities available to web developers and web browsers everywhere. We warmly invite any interested company to join Khronos and become involved in this exciting initiative.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc., COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics Inc. used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.